Eating Together as a Family and Reducing Youthful Drug Use

Parents should east dinner with their children in order to reduce
youthful drug use urges a nation-wide public-service campaign featuring
Barbara Bush and Jamie Lee Curtis. The advice is based on a report
supposedly showing that frequent family dining reduces by half the
risk of substance abuse by young people. 1

“If I could wave a magic wand to make a dent in the substance
abuse problem, I would make sure that every child in America had
dinner with his or her parents at least five times a week,”
says Joe Califano, head of the Center on Addiction and Substance
Abuse, the group behind the report. “There is no more important
thing a parent can do” to reduce the chance that their children
will use drugs, insists Califano. He argues that it “ is the
key to ridding our nation of the scourge of substance abuse.”
2

Eating together as a family probably has many benefits. But what
of the claim that doing so reduces drug use by 50%?

The study does NOT show that eating together as a family
causes lower drug use. Consisting of a telephone survey
of 1,000 young people between the ages of 12 and 17 and of 829 parents,
it only found that among this sample of people, those who ate with
their parents scored 50% lower on a substance-abuse risk assessment
than those who didn’t. 3

Anyone who has ever taken an introductory course in research methods
will see red flags everywhere. Indeed, the report could well serve
as a case study in how not to conduct research.

For starters, the samples of parents and young people is not at
all representative of American families. The researchers began with
over 37,000 phone numbers. One-third were excluded because of language
barriers, no one answered the phone, and any of a number of other
reasons. Of the remaining phone numbers, 9,000 represent people
who refused to answer questions, and about 1,000 “were cut
off.“ The company that conducted the survey admitted that
it has “a very low response rate” yet absolutely nothing
was done to address this serious problem. 4

The report concludes that frequently eating together as a family
reduces drug risk by 50%, but fails to consider the effects of age.
Seventeen-year-olds are much more likely to use drugs than are 12-year-olds.
They are also much more likely to eat separately from other family
members. Ignoring this important and obvious fact essentially ensures
the resulting conclusion, which is almost certainly meaningless.
5

However, science writer Carl Bialik asked the survey company to
conduct the simple analysis necessary to examine the effects of
age. The result? Not surprisingly, “age correlated more strongly
with risk than did family dinners.” It should be unnecessary
to report that the investigators also failed to take into account
family socioeconomic status. And the list goes on and on. 6

Another serious problem is that the researchers didn’t actually
compare family dining with drug use. Instead they compared dining
behavior with a “drug risk score” that they created.
The risk score was based on such things a whether or not respondents
said their friends use drugs. Although the investigators asked respondents
if they use drugs themselves, that information was not included
in calculating the drug risk scores. Information on actual drug
use was apparently discarded unused for reasons unknown. 7

The report was self-published by the CASA, which has been criticized
for usually avoiding the scrutiny of peer review required by publication
in scientific and scholarly journals. Reports that bypass the peer
review process may use faulty sampling techniques, improper statistical
analyses, draw unwarranted conclusions, and make unsubstantiated
assertions. In the absence of peer review the public is completely
unprotected. Special interests groups can , and often do, pass off
shoddy and even intentionally deceptive reports as legitimate scientific
research. 8

In one of the public service announcements, Barbara Bush says “We
know the more often children have dinner with their families, the
less likely they are to smoke, drink, and use drugs. So simply having
dinner together can help your children, forever.” 9

Eating dinner together regularly is probably a reflection of strong
family ties, a desire to communicate and share with other family
members, and a generally well functioning family. In short, its
almost certainly an effect rather than a cause
of such functioning. Therefore, a dysfunctional family that decides
to eat together regularly in order to prevent drug use will probably
fail in its objective.

So what’s the harm in urging people to eat together. Nothing,
unless it misleads people into thinking that by simply by doing
so they can solve the problem of drug abuse. That would be a counterproductive
disaster.

References

1. Bialik, Carl. The link
between dinner and drugs. The Wall Street Journal, October
7, 2005.

2. Center on Substance
Abuse and Addiction. CASA and TV Land/Nick at Nite report shows
frequent family dinners cut teens’ substance abuse risk in
half. New York: National Center on Substance Abuse and Addiction
at Columbia University press release, September 13, 2005.

3. Center on Substance
Abuse and Addiction. The Importance of Family Dinner II.
New York: National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia
University, September, 2005.

4. Bialik, Carl. The link
between dinner and drugs. The Wall Street Journal, October
7, 2005.

5. Center on Substance
Abuse and Addiction. The Importance of Family Dinner II.
New York: National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia
University, September, 2005.

6. Bialik, Carl. The link
between dinner and drugs. The Wall Street Journal, October
7, 2005.

7. Center on Substance
Abuse and Addiction. The Importance of Family Dinner II.
New York: National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia
University, September, 2005.

8. See The Center on Addiction
and Substance Abuse: A Center for Alcohol Statistics Abuse? (http://www.alcoholfacts.org/CASAAlcoholStatisticsAbuse.html)

9. Bialik, Carl. The link
between dinner and drugs. The Wall Street Journal, October
7, 2005.